“The universe is a cabinet of mysteries we tiptoe by, wondering,” Susan Glickman writes in one of the poems in The Smooth Yarrow. That capacity for wonder is a hallmark of this Toronto writer’s appealing sixth collection.comments

Early on in Skios, protagonist Nikki Hook is contentedly surveying the idyllic grounds of the Fred Toppler Foundation, on the fictional Greek island of the book’s name. Nikki is the attractive and super-efficient assistant of Mrs. Fred Toppler, widow of the organization’s founder. To Nikki, the picturesque setting is “delicately balanced, like the works of a good watch. . . It was a complete world, a miniature model of the European civilization that it existed to promote, and she could almost feel it sitting in the palm of her hand, its clockwork quietly humming.”comments

Recently, I read an article that included a rock musician’s answers to a variation on the Proust questionnaire, and I was surprised that this twenty-something guy named “aging” as the thing he feared most. Given our youth-centred culture, maybe it makes sense that old age is a spectre that haunts even those who are decades away from it. Then again, in demographic terms we’re an aging population, and media attention such as the Star’s investigations of nursing homes is a reminder that we don’t have adequate facilities to provide proper care for the elderly now, and the need is going to grow. Scary indeed.comments

The title page of Phil Hall's Killdeer, this year's winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, includes the subtitle “Essay-poems”—and true to that term, it's a series of musings threaded with quotes from other writers and thinkers and yet also “poetic” in their idiosyncratic turns of phrase and striking metaphors.comments